Why integrate Office 365 and Dynamics 365?

Five years after Microsoft introduced Office 365, the tech giant launched Dynamics 365 (D365) to further help businesses reach their goals. Integrating these solutions has become easier with every iteration, thanks to the cloud.

This affords small- and medium-sized businesses in South Florida access to a wide range of tools to improve customer interaction, enhance productivity, transform processes, and more. You practically have a centralized app that gives your employees access to several tools at once, so they can work anytime and anywhere using any device.

Excel

When you need to update volumes of records, you don’t have to edit one after the other. Eliminate this painstaking process by updating records in Excel online. Once completed, updates will be saved in D365.

Analyzing data is also easier because you don’t need to leave the app. You can use Excel to view or even edit your reports, which automatically update as long as data in Excel stays connected to D365. Moreover, integration with Excel enables importing and exporting data, creating templates from existing data, etc.

Outlook

Track emails easily, follow sales activities, access Dynamics records, and create activity lists in response to emails — these are just some of the things you can do with the Outlook integration. Some of these functions aren’t really fresh news, as Dynamics and Outlook have a long-standing relationship. In fact, the older versions of Dynamics CRM were integrated with Outlook.

Word

The integration with Word enables you to use the templates available in D365. This saves you a great deal of time creating documents when working with similar records. You can design the layout of the document like how you would on Microsoft Word. This is especially helpful when you need to create a professional document that has to be customized for another organization, for instance.

Power BI

Gather data from different sources and use them to produce rich visualizations, which you can embed into your D365 dashboards. You can use D365 as a source to produce reports and share them with non-users.

Consider it a self-service analytics solution that automatically refreshes data. This way, you can easily gain insight into pertinent data, such as your customers’ purchasing history. From there, you can develop strategies based on the trends you discover.

SharePoint

From Word documents to PDF files, every business stores information using documents, which is why SharePoint is such a well-utilized integration with D365. Sure, you can store attachments in the “Notes” area, but there is a limit on the database and file sizes it allows, not to mention it has a lack of structure.

SharePoint, on the other hand, was primarily developed for storing and managing documents. It offers exceptional features like approval workflows and versioning, which enables you to record updates separately. All these features make SharePoint a cost-efficient choice.

OneDrive

Storing, syncing, and sharing any kind of file is a breeze with OneDrive. Let’s say you are working on an unfinished document. You can store it in OneDrive, and it will automatically sync to any O365 service and any device you’re using.

Apart from sharing documents, OneDrive allows your employees to track projects, collaborate online, input and secure data, etc. Think of it as a tie that binds all Office 365 services.

OneNote

Take notes on the go with OneNote. With this integration, you can create and edit notes within an activity wall record. You can then share these unstructured notes with anyone from your organization. In a sense, OneNote is like a digital notebook that captures, organizes, and stores notes (and images) on any device.

Get the most out of the Office 365 and Dynamics 365 integration by turning to an experienced managed services provider. Contact us today!